According to a report by Development Bank of Japan, “the value of intellectual assets including intellectual property, human assets, and infrastructure assets is about 40% of the total market value of enterprises”. Importance of intellectual property is obvious today. A technology is required that enables objective and quantitative evaluation of an intellectual property right (meaning both a registered patent right and a pending patent application performed automatically by computer systems). Such a technology is indispensable for investment planning for intellectual property rights, setting of licensing terms, assignment pricing and the like.
Patent Document 1 below discloses a technique for estimating the value of a patent group based on another specific patent group using a regression analysis method.
Patent Document 2 below discloses a technique for objectively and quantitatively evaluating the value (patent strength) of a patent based on a legal action from a third party against that patent. For example, if an invalidation trial is requested to a certain patent, it might mean that there is a company considering that patent an obstacle to their business, meaning the value of that patent as a business differentiator can be high.
Patent Document 3 discloses an evaluation method based on a cited document in refusal in the examination of a patent application. If a patent can prohibit allowance of another patent, the value of the former patent can be considered to be high. This is a basic assumption in this evaluation method.
However, the traditional intellectual property assessment methods including the above were based solely on legal analysis or technical analysis (for example, the frequency of occurrence of terms used or the sentence structure in the claims; the frequency of occurrence of specific keywords in the specification). They had a limitation in that they did not sufficiently reflect the business value of the patent owner in the market or business relation between companies in the market. Since intellectual property rights are meaningful only if they can provide business value, intellectual property right evaluation without business contexts are not pragmatic.
For example, in the case where a patent is evaluated based on the fact that it was used as a citation leading another patent application of another company to rejection, the evaluation should be adjusted based on the size of that company. For example, suppose a bio-based startup company develops basic patented technology for drug discovery and acquires a patent right; even if that patent was frequently are cited, but the counterparts are small companies without enough cash, license out is unlikely. Conversely, if the counterparts are major pharmaceutical companies, license out is relatively high, even if the number of citation is small. Therefore, while the patent that was able to prevent allowance of patent applications of larger companies should be evaluated higher, no such element has not been found in the prior art.
Moreover, a business relationship between the inventor of a cited patent application and the inventor of a patent application in examination. For example, if a patent is cited in the examination of another patent application by a competitor and has made that application rejected, the former patent should be highly evaluated compared to the case where it has made a patent of a non-competitive partner company rejected, because the former case has much more impact to the business. However, such aspect lacked in the prior art.